In my writing I put a lot of effort into advocating things like dialogue and storytelling, but two striking moments in the past 24 hours have made me stop and think again. One was a conversation with a friend who had just read one of my papers bemoaning the lack of conversation in organisational life. His immediate response was to say that what he often sees is “too much dialogue”.
This exchange prompted me to wonder “What if, for a change, I were to take a critical stance towards conversation and to praise the use of writing to organise, analyse and manage?” After all, I am often the first to use writing in these ways. For instance, I reach for pen (or keyboard) whenever I want to develop clarity about a complex project, or to work out what I want a meeting or presentation to cover.
I also use the written word to keep important information in easy-to-find form. For example, I have a program called Evernote where I deposit all those bits of information that would previously have covered scraps of paper or filled little notebooks. My Evernote now has nearly 500 notes in it, which I can access from my laptop, ipad or phone. They are organised into no less than 21 searchable online “notebooks” with names like “House”, “Garden”, “Food”, “Money”, “Client work” and “My writing”. How organised is that?!
This all got me wondering why I so often argue that people overuse the written word and underuse conversation. I think the main reason is that I feel a need to counteract received wisdom. I feel I live in a world where people produce written strategies, plans, reports, agendas, minutes and wordy slide presentations without radically questioning their practical value. I also see unthinking documentation and measurement as habits of mechanistic management, based on inappropriate application of scientific methods to human affairs.
Scientific thinking has its place, and it has certainly changed our world. I am currently reading about the scientific revolution of the 17th century and I am struck by how sensible I find Francis Bacon’s thinking. He wanted to counteract old patterns of thinking and traditional prejudices and to develop a new method of acquiring knowledge:
“This method was to be fundamentally empirical: through the careful observation of nature and the skilful devising of many and varied experiments, pursued in the context of organised cooperative research, the human mind could gradually elicit those laws and generalisations that would give man the understanding of nature necessary for its control.” (Tarnas 1991, page 272)
Sounds refreshingly clear and reasonable. The trouble only arises when people use this rational, scientific approach to address everything, including complex social and political issues such as how best to run a large organisation like the NHS, how to achieve quality in education or how to stop destroying life on this planet.
Related reading
Richard Tarnas. The Passion of the Western Mind. Pimlico, 1991
Iain McGilchrist. The Master and his Emissary. Yale University Press, 2012
This exchange prompted me to wonder “What if, for a change, I were to take a critical stance towards conversation and to praise the use of writing to organise, analyse and manage?” After all, I am often the first to use writing in these ways. For instance, I reach for pen (or keyboard) whenever I want to develop clarity about a complex project, or to work out what I want a meeting or presentation to cover.
I also use the written word to keep important information in easy-to-find form. For example, I have a program called Evernote where I deposit all those bits of information that would previously have covered scraps of paper or filled little notebooks. My Evernote now has nearly 500 notes in it, which I can access from my laptop, ipad or phone. They are organised into no less than 21 searchable online “notebooks” with names like “House”, “Garden”, “Food”, “Money”, “Client work” and “My writing”. How organised is that?!
This all got me wondering why I so often argue that people overuse the written word and underuse conversation. I think the main reason is that I feel a need to counteract received wisdom. I feel I live in a world where people produce written strategies, plans, reports, agendas, minutes and wordy slide presentations without radically questioning their practical value. I also see unthinking documentation and measurement as habits of mechanistic management, based on inappropriate application of scientific methods to human affairs.
Scientific thinking has its place, and it has certainly changed our world. I am currently reading about the scientific revolution of the 17th century and I am struck by how sensible I find Francis Bacon’s thinking. He wanted to counteract old patterns of thinking and traditional prejudices and to develop a new method of acquiring knowledge:
“This method was to be fundamentally empirical: through the careful observation of nature and the skilful devising of many and varied experiments, pursued in the context of organised cooperative research, the human mind could gradually elicit those laws and generalisations that would give man the understanding of nature necessary for its control.” (Tarnas 1991, page 272)
Sounds refreshingly clear and reasonable. The trouble only arises when people use this rational, scientific approach to address everything, including complex social and political issues such as how best to run a large organisation like the NHS, how to achieve quality in education or how to stop destroying life on this planet.
Related reading
Richard Tarnas. The Passion of the Western Mind. Pimlico, 1991
Iain McGilchrist. The Master and his Emissary. Yale University Press, 2012